Friday bullets, Sept. 13, 2019, or Saturday... life happens

I started writing this last night, but the article which was due kind of took over and I never got back to it. I have a few minutes, so I'll actually finish it.

I have been a little negligent about the blog this week. Either I'm too tired when I sit down to write in the evening or I seem to have nothing to say. (Probably because I am too tired.) The days are full.

• M.'s new shed was delivered which is replacing the trailer which wouldn't stop leaking. The inside needs to be finished, but the outside is done, and it doesn't leak!

Pretty cute, huh?

From the front door, where you can see the downstairs and the loft.

Taken from the loft looking towards the front door.

• While I was in Arizona, everyone at home celebrated P.'s 19th birthday.

• Last week, on the day I left for Arizona, we received a surprise box in the mail from a friend of mine. It was loaded with all sorts of ancient Egyptian goodies that she had sent me. Take a look.

It's a lot, isn't it? Everyone had a great time looking at everything. We will make use of most of it as we come to that topic in the schedule. There were are so many cool hieroglyphic resources in it, everyone is very eager to get to that part. If you want to check out the business where they came from, it's Discoveries Egyptian Imports. It's not often you get a genuine treasure box in the mail.

• We have finished our second week of school, and everything is still working well. We're even still on schedule. I'm excited that everyone seems to be enjoying what we are doing, including the writing. 
• In other school news, I want to show you what R. did for me yesterday.

I know this doesn't look like much to you, but I want to explain what a great big huge deal that 'X' is up there. If you have never taught a child who struggles with significant learning issues, then you don't know how difficult it can be for them to draw lines that slant. This threw me with H., because until that point, I didn't know that it was a tricky thing. Everyone else had just done it. But when you have a child whose two halves of their brain don't always function together, slanting is hard. Super hard. 

Last year, R. could not do this page. We stopped much earlier because even pencil exercises like this were too difficult. Even drawing a line to match two dots going up and down, as you see at the top, was too difficult if she didn't have a line to trace. She couldn't create it on her own. And even with the crossing lines, tracing the diagonal lines was baffling. We put this book away, and I wasn't sure we would ever get it out again. 

R. did so well last week, that I decided to give it a shot. She managed two pages in it, following instructions, stopping when finished with something (that was pretty huge), and drawing these lines. You can see it took a little bit of help for her to get those crossing lines on her own. (I was mirroring what she was trying to do on the previous X so she could see the difference. Eventually she got it.)

Here's a photo of the whole page. She did not try to color the skunk orange! That was another success.

This book is the first of the Rod and Staff preschool curriculum that I have used with everyone. The 'A' book is perfect for three and four year olds. I am so excited that R. has moved up to working at a three year old level!

• G. is really coming along with her horsemanship skills. She can now halter and lead Bristol to and from the pasture all by herself, and today she started to learn to post.
• Ducks are funny. After I had brought the horses in the other day, I had noticed that all the ducks were near the barn finding yummy things to eat in the grass, so I watched them for a bit. That is until L. steps out onto the back porch, snare drum in hand, and starts making quite a bit of noise with it. The ducks, instead of running away from the sound, seemed to take it as some sort of signal, and all ran back in a row (because having your ducks in a row is easy, it's trying to get them to not walk in a row that's hard), back towards the house and all the noise. It was funny. It made no sense at all, but it was funny.
• We watched a travel show about traveling up the Nile, and now I am consumed with the desire to go to Egypt and sail on the Nile. I might need to break out the Elizabeth Peters Amelia Peabody mysteries and reread them all again.

And that's all I got for now. Enjoy your weekend. Maybe next week I will find I have more to say.